The Internet has changed the way people gather information, establish relationships with one another and even how people communicate with one another. Additionally, the Internet has changed the way companies seek potential customers and even what the meaning of a business is. It has changed the way companies advertise, sell, coordinate with one another and compete with one another. With this change has come a huge explosion in the number of Web Pages for people to visit. Search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others have come into being to help people find their way to Web Pages that they desire. As a result, the number and types of channels that a marketer can leverage has also exploded—beyond organic and paid search, they can also leverage blogs, social media, video sharing, mobile content and ads, display ads, and many other channels.
However, many Web Pages do not have a good way of tracking how visitors have come to find their Web Pages and the details concerning the reference that drove the visitor to come to the web page. Indeed, many Web Pages cannot accurately determine how many people have visited the Web Page and are instead forced to estimate the number of visitors. Conventionally, this is done with a tracking pixel or some other similar mechanism. The tracking pixel constitutes the code to create a single pixel on the Web Page. However, the tracking pixel also contains the code to perform a certain action or request a certain item from a tracking server. The tracking server keeps track of how many actions or requests it receives, which is used to estimate the number of visitors who have visited the Web Page.
Nevertheless, this can lead to inaccuracies in many instances and provides little to no information about the marketers and the web page's performance from the external channel. In particular, it relies on the user's web browser to correctly execute the tracking pixel and on the tracking server to correctly track the number of actions or requests. However, the tracking pixel only sees very limited data from the referral headers about how the visitor came to the website. Without directly crawling and analyzing the page where the visitor came from, there is inaccurate and very inaccurate view into how the visitor got to a web page, what was our performance in those external channels, and how a marketer should optimize their online marketing campaigns.
However, the number of visitors to a Web Page, and their actions once there, may have a significant impact on the success of the Web Page. For example, many Web Pages rely on tracking the number of visitors to bring in advertising revenue to sustain the Web Page or supplement the revenue that the Web Page brings in. Therefore, accurately determining the number and behavior of visitors, how the visitors got to the web page, and correlating this with the marketing campaigns and efforts will help the marketer to focus on and optimize campaigns to bring additional revenue.
Additionally, tracking the behavior of the actions of each visitor would allow the Web Page to be marketed more efficiently. In particular, many Web Pages track their organic search performance in search engines based on number of visits for certain keywords. However, they cannot determine how many visitors came as a result of a particular search engine result and rank position to the Web Page, instead they must estimate this based on the data (referral header) passed to the web page which only helps them determine the number of visitors that came from a specific keyword. Without understanding key attributes of their performance on the search engine, they cannot accurately determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Moreover, they cannot determine how their organic search marketing efforts would impact what those visitors do on the Web Page when they have found the Web Page. For example, if a Web Page is selling merchandise, there is currently no way to determine who completed a particular purchase on the Web Page and compare that with how that visitor came to the Web Page.
Therefore, owners and designers of Web Pages must estimate how visitors have come to the Web Page and what they do once they are on the Web Page. This does not allow them to determine which actions would present a better chance for success of the Web Page. For example, a Web Page owner might be confronted with limited marketing budgets that allow them to either improve their ranking in search engine results or that will place advertisements for their Web Page on other Web Pages but not both. Currently, the Web Page owner must choose which strategy to follow with limited information on which would be more effective.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.